Being a mathematics major at Harvard when you look at the late ’90s, Yagan forever changed the market for student cheat sheets, then dominated by the iconic black-and-yellow CliffsNotes booklets, together with his SparkNotes, a totally free Web-based copycat. Next, Yagan went after the music company, producing the file-sharing device eDonkey. Ahead of the business ended up being litigated away from presence with a record-industry lawsuit, it boasted the whole world’s most popular file-sharing computer software, larger also than Napster.

Now Yagan had attempt to bring liberated to online dating sites, a growing market dominated by an amount of, as Yagan saw them, high priced and unsatisfactory rivals like IAC’s (NYSE: IACI) Match.com. Yagan figured he could inflict damage that is serious Match, the industry giant with 2007 income of $349 million, as well as other big registration web web web sites such as for example eHarmony and JDate simply by using exactly the same strategy he employed with SparkNotes. ”Take a current company, ” he explains, ”reduce the revenue that industry creates by providing a totally free item, after which claim the rest of the income on your own. ”

He had invested 3 years building their site that is dating, with partner Chris Coyne and had raised almost $7 million.

But something was not working. The organization required an enormous market to generate income. Rather, after couple of years of fast development, its website traffic ended up being flat-lining while rivals were growing rapidly. By very early 2007, Yagan knew their screen of possibility had been shutting. He necessary to jump-start their company or face a death that is slow. Fortsätt läsa →